Half Whispered Words
by blueyellowgreen
Summary: "Natalie was able to start picking her life back up, gluing everything back together that her family had unintentionally broken inside of her. She might have done it, too, if things hadn't spun so inescapably out of control." Henry's POV.
1. Chapter 1

"This girl will be the death of you if you're not careful, Henry. Sometimes you just have to put yourself first."

When my mom talks, I listen. She says things in this quiet, measured voice, and her words are so infrequent that it's nearly startling when she does speak out of the blue. At the time, I waited with one hand still poised to reach into the refrigerator, waiting for her to say more until I was convinced I hadn't heard it at all. But then she nodded, as if agreeing with herself, and patted me on the shoulder on the way out.

"Put _you _first." She said again.

Occasionally, the memory of her advice would creep across my mind, but sitting and staring at the ceiling in my bedroom one rare quiet night, I decided that it didn't matter what the half-whispered words had meant. What's wrong with helping somebody when they need it, you know?

But the thing is, Natalie needed more than I could give.

I reached into everything I had to offer and then some, hoping that it would be like throwing her a lifeline, something she could hold onto until she was ready to swim to the shore. I gave her time. I gave her support. I gave her distance when I thought she needed it. Say what you will about our relationship, but you can't say neither of us tried the best we could - Nat to keep her head above water, and me to do the same, I guess.

For awhile, it seemed like it was working. We could both see the shore and we were getting there slowly but surely. And one autumn afternoon after her mom left, she said those three one-syllable words that I'd been wanting, maybe even needing to hear.

"What?" I had said automatically, snapping my eyes away from the movie we were watching to search her face. The slightest blush had started to spread ever so slightly on her cheeks, the only color in the otherwise flawlessly porcelain skin.

It was one of those perfect early fall days, when the air smells so crisp you can practically _feel _it, too cold to go out without a sweatshirt but not cold enough to feel uncomfortable.

"Come on, Henry, you heard me."

I heard the defensive note in her voice and knew that if I dwelt on the subject, defense would quickly turn to annoyance, which would in turn lead to anger, and I didn't want that on such an incredible day, and right after she'd said, well..._that_. "Me too." I decided to say, and she leaned back against my shoulder with the comfortable motion that comes with familiarity; she wasn't quick enough, though, to hide the smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

We both pretended to watch the movie for a few seconds before she snorted with a brief chuckle.

"Hm?" I poked her in the side lightly. She squirmed - like I knew she would - and elbowed me.

"Me or you?" She asked.

"What?"

"I said 'I love you' and you said 'me too,' so you could have been saying you love yourself."

"Why the hell would I say that? I love _you._ Although I'm not saying I hate what I see in the mirror either," I teased her, and her chuckle blossomed into full out laughter.

"I don't know, Henry!" She exclaimed, and soon both of us were laughing and in that moment I remember her face perfectly. It was the last time I remember her laughing. I mean, _really_ laughing, with her shoulders back and one hand flying to her mouth and her eyes just sparkling like nothing I'd ever seen before and nothing I'd ever see after.

Because Natalie went away. I still saw her going through the motions of living, but she wasn't really alive; not the Natalie I loved, anyway.

It wasn't that she went back to getting high. I still smoked occasionally - I mean, why the hell not? - but Natalie wouldn't touch any of it. She told me that she was getting her life the way she wanted it, and she wouldn't let anything get in the way of it.

I was proud of her for that.

What I've learned about Nat's childhood was gathered from a combination of stories from her and her father, pictures around their house, and general observation, and it seemed downright miserable. I remember the first time that I had dinner at her house, and her mom had baked a birthday cake for her dead brother. It wasn't a memorial birthday type thing, either. Mrs. Goodman actually thought that I was there to hang out for her son's 17th birthday party.

It wasn't just embarrassing to Natalie, even though she definitely _was _embarrassed. But she was as hurt as I was confused, which is to say we were charting on our respective emotions at like a 99 on a scale of 1 to 10. We smoked a bowl and just tried to forget about it, which seemed like the best way to deal with that kind of thing at the time, but later I found out that the incident basically summed up her childhood.

My family may have its share of problems, but one thing I can say is that they've always tried to do their best for me. I don't think that's happened in Nat's life. Sure, her parents tried their best to make things work - but they didn't try their best for _Natalie_. It was always about her mom.

So when her mom left in March of her junior year, that's when Natalie was able to start picking her life back up, gluing everything back together that her family had unintentionally broken inside of her.

She might have done it, too, if things hadn't spun so inescapably out of control.


	2. Chapter 2

Sometimes, thinking back on the months before and after that perfect autumn afternoon, I wish I knew back then what I know now.

But then again, I know by the deep, faint pain in my chest that I wouldn't have been able to do a thing about it even if I'd known everything that was coming.

I started noticing little things around the time Mr. Goodman started working Saturdays. He said it was so that he could help pay for Natalie's college tuition and Natalie said it was so that he didn't have to be around her in an otherwise empty house. I thought that it was a little bit of both, but when Natalie brought it up I always agreed with her.

She had her weekly piano lessons on Saturdays, and most mornings she'd drive herself there in the car that had sat unused in their garage for months. It had, at one point before I'd met her, been her mother's car. Together, Natalie and I had cleaned it out after Mrs. Goodman had left. We pushed it with a huge effort out into the driveway the first warm day in April, rolled out the vacuum, and got to work.

"Oh, my god," Natalie had said when we got it into the sunlight after wiping a finger along the dusty, dirty exterior of the car. "This is disgusting. It's not like she's a neat freak or anything, but jeez."

"When's the last time she drove it?"

"I don't know. Seven or eight years ago, at least. I was in, like, third grade. But I think she had it when they got married, and she might have had it for awhile even before _that_."

"How did you even learn to drive?" I asked incredulously, taking a step back to view the car on the whole. It really was an eyesore: an ugly green color with rust spotting it here and there, a gaudy disco ball hanging off the mirror, and a missing hubcap on the back passenger wheel.

"I drove my dad's Honda. I had to, I'd be surprised if this one even starts." She rolled up her sleeves and wrinkled her nose as she picked a t-shirt gingerly off the top of the pile of junk that she pulled out of the front seat. "He tried to buy her a new car once, and she got offended. She thought he was trying to take away her _individuality_. Because that's what my mom's lacking."

I stepped forward, slightly amused, to help Natalie move a patchy tote bag full of unreturned library books and take out some empty water bottles that sat just beneath it. I started to wipe down the outside of the car, listening to Natalie make light talk and occasionally throwing in a comment or two. We continued that way, making some conversation but mostly focusing on the task at hand.

At one point, I looked into the newly clean back window of the car. A book sat on the seat, its front cover folded back, and on the front page in neat, childish handwriting read NATALIE GOODMAN'S. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. The "please" was underlined three or four times, and I had to smile. Nat was possessive by nature; if something was in her possession, it could also be in her control, which left nothing to chaos or chance. It was somehow comforting to know that she had always, to some degree, been that way.

"Working hard, or hardly working, Henry?" She asked teasingly in her best imitation of her father's voice. I hadn't even realized I'd stopped cleaning and was just staring into the car until her voice snapped me out of my thoughts.

"Am I your butler or your boyfriend?" I retorted.

"Why can't you be both?" She skip-stepped over to me and bumped her hip into mine. "I mean, it's not like you don't do more than one thing already." Laughter creeping in, she ticked them off one by one on her slender pianist's fingers. "You're my boyfriend. You're my therapist. You're a stoner."

"I get it." I said, and Natalie wordlessly pointed the the decrepit car.

"Let's finish then, Sir Henry."

"You'd call your butler _sir_?"

"Sure, I would." She said, still grinning as she headed back to the back of the car, but almost immediately I saw the smile on her face slide off too quickly. I tried to see past her to see what had caused the sudden change, but all that was left in the trunk were two duffel bags. Natalie took one out gingerly by its well-worn strap, wincing when she'd brought it into the sunlight.

It was a diaper bag. On the side facing me, there was a large cartoon giraffe grinning garishly, surrounded by neon palm trees.

"Let me take that, Nat," I said quietly, stepping toward her, but she yanked it back and sat promptly on the driveway with the bag between her knees.

"It must've been his," she said distantly, tracing the pattern. "Don't you think?"

"It could've been for you."

And it could have. The design wasn't overwhelmingly geared toward either a girl or a boy, and Natalie and her brother had only been a year apart, but somehow I just knew that it wasn't Natalie's.

She unzipped the bag slowly, and against my better judgement I didn't say anything, just watched carefully as she took out what was inside: an empty bottle, a few disposable diapers, and finally a tiny hat. It was a miniature cloth baseball cap, blue and white and not at all something new parents would put on a baby girl.

"Maybe we should - " I stepped forward, reaching for the hat, but Natalie held onto it tightly.

"They bought him a hat," she said distantly.

"Yeah." I didn't know what else to say - I mean, she was sitting there, holding the hat, staring at it like she'd never seen one before. "They did."

"It's just..." she looked up at me, biting her lip, and I stretched my legs out on the warm pavement to sit next to her. Both of us looked at the hat and Natalie shrugged, her shoulder rubbing against mine. "It's the most real he's ever been in my life, _right now_."

That was something I could easily believe. Other than a few times - like that "birthday party", for instance - I wouldn't have known Natalie's parents had ever even had another child at all.

"Yeah." I said again, uselessly.

"I hated him." She gave a soft humorless chuckle. "I probably still do. Can you imagine? Hating a _baby_."

I remained silent. I couldn't imagine, not really, and the fact of the matter was that I was completely and totally confused. This wasn't like Natalie. It's not that she's some kind of sociopath, it's just hard to feel for someone who you never knew, especially when that someone took away so much of what you could have had. That's something I've never blamed her for and never will.

"I hated him for what _they_ did," she said quietly.

"It's no one's fault." I said, hearing the uncertainty in my own voice. Most kids have imaginary monsters under their bed; Natalie's monster was five foot five and wore heels.

_And yours? _I found myself thinking, but brushed off the thought as Nat spoke again.

"You should go home," she said abruptly, brushing off her jeans as she stood with the hat still clutched in one hand.

"What?" I tried to reach for her arm, but she strode toward the house without a backwards glance toward either the junk still spread across the driveway or me. I watched her go, half expecting her to turn around. But the door opened and closed and she didn't come back out, leaving me to stare at the house while my thoughts grew to a deafening roar.

* * *

A/N: Thank you guys! I very much appreciate the feedback. :) Allisonosity: Yeah, I guess that should have been obvious. For some reason, I was thinking of how Diana brings out the cake and _then_ Dr. Madden says "he's almost eighteen"...but I guess it makes a whole lot more sense that she'd be doing an early birthday haha. Thanks! I'll fix that ASAP.


	3. Chapter 3

Natalie quit her Saturday piano lessons only three weeks after we fixed up the car. Mr. Goodman had come home early one afternoon and, with the element of surprise on his side, he managed to get it out of her that she hadn't been going for weeks. From what I understood of the bits I'd pieced together from Nat, he was none too pleased, but acquiesced that it was her decision to make one way or the other.

I should have _known_ that things weren't right.

But we believe what we want to believe, and on the day of Nat's senior recital and final audition for Yale, I put on my old standby black tie and jacket, prepared to hear some kind of masterpiece. We - Nat, Mr. Goodman and I - took his car with Natalie in the front passenger seat and me in the back. I preferred it that way. When Natalie and I sat together in the back, almost every time I looked up I'd see Mr. Goodman's eyes on us in the rearview mirror, like he was going to say something, but he never did.

"So, what will you be playing?" He asked Natalie about halfway through the two hour trip, his voice almost too cheerful.

"Can you just keep your eyes on the road?" Natalie asked, tapping her passenger side window restlessly. _Tap tap._ "I don't want to talk about it."

"But I thought you wanted to, you know, talk more."

"Well, I don't, okay?" _Tap tap tap._

"Alright. Do you...want to pick a radio station, then?"

I had to hand it to Mr. Goodman, he was trying. It was almost painfully awkward to watch sometimes, but he hadn't given up yet, and I wouldn't put my money on it anytime soon.

"I don't care." Nat bit restlessly at the side of her finger, staring out the window without seeming to really see anything.

"95.9 has variety. At least, that's what their slogan says." I offered, more for Mr. Goodman's benefit than Natalie's. From my view of the side of her face, I could see her rolling her eyes, but she didn't turn away from the window.

Some kind of soft rock music filled the car for the next few minutes, the only sound besides the buzz of the heat vents and the gentle hum of other cars on the road. I started to relax a little, letting myself sink into the seat as the music lulled me into a sense of calm. Even if Natalie didn't get into Yale - which was totally unlikely - she'd have other options. Everything would be okay. I'd seen her work herself to the bone on auditions before, and surely the incident in the practice room was just an extension of that. I was getting worked up over nothing.

I had almost convinced myself when suddenly Natalie reached one hand and pressed the dial with far more force than was necessary, her hand dropping limply back to her lap in the silence that followed.

I looked at the hand, and for some reason that was the tipoff to me that something was really not right: her fingernails. She files them down and paints them before a recital or an audition, always neurotic about being perfect for those types of things. But they were jagged and unpainted, and for the first time I noticed that she didn't have any sheet music with her, either. Alarm bells were clanging in my head, and I took a deep breath to quiet them.

"Nat," I said quietly, futilely attempting not to attract Mr. Goodman's attention in the tiny car. "Why didn't you want me to hear you play?"

She ignored me; I tried to think. Quitting her lessons. Never seeing her play. The nails. No sheet music. Everything was adding up, and it wasn't good.

"Natalie, what's going on?" Mr. Goodman asked. I met his tired gaze in the rearview mirror. Mr. Goodman is a nice guy who got stuck with an impossible choice. He could either cut his losses, abandon his wife, and focus on Natalie - or he could keep trying to make that one happy family the way I get the feeling he's wanted his whole life. Ever since I met him, but even more so after his wife left, there was always a kind of sadness in the deep lines of his face, as if he was grieving the fact that he couldn't go through with of those things before it had damaged everything he cared about most in the world.

My heart went out to him, in a way. So for that one fleeting moment, meeting his concerned eyes in the mirror, I was one hundred and ten percent on Mr. Goodman's side.

"I don't think Natalie's actually signed up for this audition." I said firmly before I could change my mind.

The car almost immediately lurched as he turned into the nearest parking lot, cutting off a woman who was headed toward her car with an armful of groceries. Somehow she managed to find a free hand to flip him off, but I don't know if he even noticed. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and he veered violently into an empty parking spot.

"_Jesus! _Are you trying to kill us?" Natalie cried out, her feet slamming into the bottom of the car as she slid forward and finally looked up from her window. I only glanced at her for a second - my attention was on her father, who was staring at her in disbelief.

"Well?" He asked dangerously. Nat shifted uncomfortably. Even then, _knowing_ she'd lied to me and to everyone, and as she threw me one last spiteful gaze before meeting her father's eyes, I felt guilty that I'd ratted her out. There's something to be said for the way that I know the way her face moves, the way her voice lilts on certain words, the way she'll react the way I predict nine out of ten times, but that tenth time she'll completely throw me through a loop; it felt like her secret had been mine as much as it had been hers.

"They might not be expecting me," she said, barely audible over the car's engine. "They're...not. I never signed up. There's no slot for me, okay?"

"What the hell are we doing here then, Natalie?" Mr. Goodman's voice was tight with anger. "Did _you_ know about this?"

I realized a split second too late that he was talking to me. "No," I said, my voice ringing too loudly to my own ears. But it was the truth. Until just a few minutes before, the idea hadn't even manifested itself in my mind, but once it had it was sickeningly likely.

"Alright. Alright. Al_right_." Mr. Goodman said, looking around helplessly. His face was a dangerous blotchy shade of red, and he took the keys out of the ignition with shaking hands, still looking at a stony-faced Natalie in disbelief. "I'm going to go and walk in the store. Wherever. It doesn't matter. I just need to walk. You two sit here and be ready to tell me what's really going on when I get back."

He shut the door behind him and locked the car. Natalie flinched at the sound of the locks popping into place, and I reached out to touch her arm. She yanked it away.

"Don't touch me, Henry." Her voice was cold but behind the ice there was venom. I sat back, momentarily speechless.

"Who are you?" I managed to come up with finally. It was the type of thing I'd said to her so many times in jest - _who are you and what have you done with Natalie, _I remember asking her once - when she'd worn a very _Vogue_, very pastel and very un-Natalie-like dress on one of the rare occasions that I had enough cash to go someplace nice for dinner. She'd ducked her head shyly, smoothing the folds of the skirt, but after that second of uncharacteristic tenderness the Natalie I knew had returned and she'd looked up at me with a half grin on her face. _Even if you hate it, I spent sixty bucks on this, so I'm getting at least one good use out of it_, she'd said then.

"I want to break up," she said now, harshly, and for a stunned moment after being jerked out of my thoughts I was sure I'd heard her incorrectly.

"What?"

"You heard me."

"You don't get to break up with _me_," I blurted before I realized what was coming out of my mouth. "Not after all I've done for you."

I could immediately see the effect of my words; she drew her slim arms across her stomach as if she could physically hold herself together, and when she spoke her voice was strained. "If I was such trouble, you were free to go at any time."

"That's not what I meant." I said, but the self-righteous voice at the back of my head screamed that it was. Maybe I hadn't meant it so hurtfully, but after all the times I'd chosen to stay with her, now that she was at that crossroads she was choosing to _leave_? Even through the murky apathy that had immediately overtaken my body, I felt a vague outrage stirring in my bones. "_Why_?"

Nine times out of ten, she would have straightened her shoulders no matter what she was feeling, looked anyone who challenged her in the eye, and faked confidence even if she was feeling utterly naked. But she surprised me yet again.

"I don't want to, but I have to," she said, her breath catching. I unbuckled my seatbelt and touched her forearm gingerly. She didn't pull away. "I'm just like her, Henry," she whispered. I looked into her face - at the tears gathering and falling quickly from her eyes, at the curve where her high cheekbones slowed them before they gathered at her chin.

Natalie doesn't cry. Natalie gets mad, gets even, gets motivated. I'd only seen her cry a few times, and that was a hell of a lot less than I would have felt like doing in her situation over the past couple of years. Despite myself I found that I couldn't stay mad at her, not like this.

"What do you mean? Whatever it is," I said, trying to keep my voice as even as possible, "You can tell me."

Her body shuddered as she took a breath, met my eyes, and said one more time, this time with a disturbingly eerie air of acceptance: "I'm just like her."


	4. Chapter 4

_It is summer and a boy plays in his backyard. Like every other summer in Washington, the air is dry. It tickles his throat, but he doesn't mind. He likes to lay in the grass when the weather is like this; his father doesn't mow their lawn often, and it just barely covers him. He imagines that he's lying in wait for a tiger. The reason doesn't matter: he's an explorer and explorers need no reasons._

_The sun beats on his bare arms, and he watches an ant - though he decides that in the jungle, it would be a scorpion - crawl over one of them, not moving, because if he does it might sting him with its vicious tail. The ant's minuscule legs just barely register on his skin, and he feels a little compassion for the thing, wondering briefly if he could feed it tiny granules of sugar and keep it in his pajama drawer._

_"Henry!"_

_He jumps at the sound of his mother's voice and, in doing so, accidentally crushes the ant under his arm and is jolted out of his fantasy. Henry feels the growing boil of anger in his chest as the ant's speck of a body falls hidden into the grass, and so it is a sullen and disappointed boy that makes his way back up to the house._

_His mother holds the door open for him to walk through. It's hotter in the house than it is outside, and she's wearing a pale green summer dress. Mint green, he thinks, and the thought of that combined with the heat emanating from the house make him think of ice cream._

_"Can we go get ice cream?" He asks. He knows that it's not likely, but still frowns deeply when she tells him no. The anger from the ant's death makes him bold, and he raises his voice into a shout. "Why not? You never let me do anything."_

_"Not now, baby, please."_

_She still calls him "baby" even though he's in the second grade. It annoys him sometimes, but there's something about the way her eyes crinkle when she says it that won't let him tell her so. Eventually he wears her down and she takes him a few blocks down the street for ice cream. And it is this - the sweet coolness, the way his mother spoils him with sprinkles and chocolate and even whipped cream - that he will remember when his father comes home from work and demands to know why the laundry isn't done._

_He keeps thinking of the ice cream when his father grabs his arm a little too hard and tells him that he's an ungrateful son of a bitch who didn't deserve the treat in the first place, and sends him to his room. He can hear them shouting even with the door closed and his feet pressed flat against it with his back against the foot of his bed for leverage._

_Henry knows that's why his mother keeps buying the bottles that they store under the sink, because the Bushmills is the only thing that will soften his father's temper. He knows, too, words that no one in the second grade should, words that if he were to say he'd get shocked glances and calls home._

_He's learned to keep quiet._

_Moments later (maybe ten, maybe a hundred, Henry thinks) his mother tearfully slams the bedroom door and locks it with a startlingly loud click. And because there's something so different about this day - he can't place what, but he feels it - he opens his own bedroom door slowly._

_He makes it all the way down the stairs and looks back up, taking one last glance back at the fingerprints permanently smudged into the paint no matter how hard his mother scrubs them, at the chipped photo frame that hangs just slightly askew, at the spot on the rug that had been there for as long as he could remember. Henry almost turns back but before he has the chance, his father turns and looks at him._

_"C'mere," his father says, muting the TV and patting the arm of the chair. With no other choice, Henry reluctantly clambers up onto the chair, even though he's usually not allowed to sit there._

_"I'm sorry about the yelling." His father says, sincerely. "You know I love you and mom, right, buddy?"_

_Henry shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about it suddenly, even though that is the entire reason behind his coming into this dark room that he hates most out of all the rooms in the house because it smells of whiskey and dust. He tries not to listen when his father speaks again._

_"It's just that, your mom, she pushes my buttons sometimes. She knows I'd never hurt her, not..." Here he trails off. Both of them know that his father doesn't ever strike his mother, nor would he. But that knowledge - significant in the large scale of things, minuscule in the present - doesn't make him any less of a monster in his son's eyes._

_So seven-year-old Henry shrugs uncharitably again, although growing older he would come to realize that there were plenty of demons in his father's closet and maybe, just maybe, he did the best he could with them. But in that moment, all he can think about was his dead ant, and the taste of ice cream on his tongue, and this ruined afternoon among many. "I don't care," he says, sliding off the chair. "I wish I never knew you."_

_"You don't mean that, Henry."_

_"Yes I do!" The boy insists, his words growing louder by the second. "I hope you die. Today, even, so that me and mom can live by ourselves. I _hate_ you."_

_They're the rashly spoken words of a soul too immature to understand their weight, but still his father can't stop the hurt from showing on his face. Henry sees it and ducks back up the stairs, guilt already starting to creep into his consciousness. It's a guilt he'll never fully be rid of._

And it's that guilt that I felt coming out of my deep thoughts as Mr. Goodman pulled up into my driveway that evening, that familiar nagging guilt that I somehow everything that goes wrong traces back to me in some way or another. After Natalie's words - "I'm just like her" - she wouldn't say any more.

Her father returned to the car and I shrugged when he looked to me for answers, and we drove home in silence.

"Bye," I said before closing the car door, my voice far too loud in the silence. Neither of them answered or even moved.

I paused outside of the living room on my way to the stairs, stepping in just for a moment to take a cigarette out of my sleeping father's hand. Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, he'd forgotten and caught the chair on fire; the room still smelled vaguely of smoke every now and then because he'd simply had my mom patch up the burned arm with some scrap fabric from the craft store. His entire existence took place either at work or in this room, even eating and sleeping in this ugly old chair.

"What are you doing?" He said suddenly, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

"You're going to catch the chair on fire again," I murmured, glancing at him briefly while I smashed it into the ashtray. I tried not to see the stains on his work shirt or the way that I could now see more scalp than hair on top of his head.

"Thanks," he gave a slow nod and drifted back off to sleep. It was the same thing all the time: a question, an answer, done.

I made my way slowly up the stairs, past the same picture frame that had hung in the hallway for years, and knocked on my mom's door. For once, she opened it, pulling her sweater tightly around her shoulders as if she was afraid that the air in the hall would be very different from the air in her small bedroom.

"What's wrong, baby?" she asked. She opened the door a little wider and I stepped into the bedroom for the first time in months, noticing immediately the food wrappers that littered the floor and bed. She'd called me baby my entire life - the story among my aunts and uncles was that she hadn't come up with a name for me until I was nearly two weeks old, and had settled into calling me "baby" - but now it suddenly felt uncomfortable in this small room with ample evidence that she hadn't left the house in days. When had I stopped noticing these things?

When had everyone in my life become a shadow of who they were?

The thought made me feel claustrophobic, and I backed toward the door - anything to get away from this room, someplace where I could think. "Nothing. It's nothing. Don't worry." I said, shrugging and stepping back into the hallway, then the next few steps to my own door, hovering outside of it while my mom's door closed with a soft click and pulling my phone out of my sweatshirt pocket.

"I can't really talk right now." Natalie's near-whispering voice came through the phone hollowly. "My dad's not exactly pleased with me right now."

"Imagine that," I said bitterly, surprising even myself.

"Look, Henry." I could picture her, fiddling with the end of her hair, biting her lip while she tried to think of the words she wanted to put into the air. To close the distance or to push it further. "I'm sorry," she said finally, "I should have told you I wasn't signed up for the audition, I know. It's just that I fucked up everything."

"How? Nat, you have to tell me what's going on."

"My dad'll go to bed at like eleven, okay? Can I come over then?"

I looked back out at the hallway, at my mom's closed door with the distant sound of the television filling the silence. "Yeah." I said, closing my eyes. "Natalie?"

"Mhm?" There was a knocking noise on the other end and I heard her voice again. "_Oh my God, dad, chill! Or am I not allowed to be in my own room without being harassed anymore?_", then, quieter, "The warden. I have to go."

I ended the call, the words I'd been meaning to say still on the tip of my tongue: _I need _you_ this time._


	5. Chapter 5

_It's an inky black night even though it's just past six. Nights start early and swallow light completely during Washington's winters, something he's learned is just part of life over the years but still hates passionately, even at just eleven years old. _

_He looks away from the car window, toward the back of his mother's head. She still won't let him sit in the front seat because he's small for his age. It's led him to be shy in school. But these new shoes they bought tonight at the mall, he thinks, those will change that. They're the same sneakers that Josh Lewis wears, and Josh Lewis is friends with everybody._

_"Mom, can I try on the sneakers?" He asks eagerly, ready to slip them on his feet and see how they fit outside of the bright lights of the store._

_"Can't it wait until we get home?" She asks, and Henry looks at the ceiling as though wondering how she can expect him to suffer such a hardship._

_"I don't want to wait," he whispers, but she hears. She turns in her seat, looping the seatbelt over her head and reaching for the shopping bag. _

_The night grows light suddenly, and Henry gapes out the window, trying to see the source - is it the sun? How long have they been at the mall? - before the car lurches and he hears a crunch and the night grows black again._

* * *

Natalie arrives promptly at eleven. She uses our old signal: she calls me and lets it ring once then taps three times on the den window below my bedroom. I head downstairs before she's even finished tapping, careful to avoid the creaky step toward the bottom. The night is overwhelmingly quiet, though I can still see my dad sleeping in his recliner. He won't wake up, not unless someone's making a concerted effort to get him out of that damn chair. Years of experience have taught me that much.

I swing open the back door, ushering Natalie inside. For the first time since I met her so long ago, I'm not enchanted by her presence, but I can't help but feel a little, inexplicable spark of warmth seeing her. And she's _here_ - that's something, at least.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi." I reply. Natalie moves forward and I take a step back instinctively, but she sits on a kitchen chair and buries her face in her hands.

"I'm so sorry," says Natalie. "But I can't do this anymore."

"Did you come here just to break up with me again?" I ask. I can't keep a note of bitterness from creeping into my voice.

"No!" Natalie shoots out of her chair and latches onto my elbows. There's something hollow, something strangely desperate about her face; her eyes catch what little light is in the room and glint frighteningly. "I'm _like her, _don't you get it? Don't you? Henry!"

"Keep it down," I hiss, and push her gently back outside, closing the door behind us. "What do you mean?"

She paces. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the small patio that leads to the junk cluttered backyard. "Like my mother. Crazy. Loco. _Fucking insane_."

"Nat, calm down." I grab onto her wrist, stopping her pacing for the time being. "Start from the beginning."

And she does.


End file.
